Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Home waters

We all know them, they may be big and brawling, small and
intimate, sedately flowing, alive with riffles, quiet or noisy; they are our
home waters. We have grown with them though the years like a constant
companion. They shaped us. We know their moods, their personality, and their
quirks. They have made us laugh and cry. They may not be the named streams of
fame, or even have a name for that matter. In the words of wisdom of my friend
Joe, “They are what they are…” Above all, they feel like an old comfortable
pair of well-worn shoes or an old hunting dog, or even an old friend and lover.

Like that old dog that always knows what you will do, or a
favorite book re-read, you and the river move at the same symbiotic pace. It
may not have always been like this though. During your early courting days you
may have hurried her, stepped on her, transgressed on her feelings a hundred
different ways, but you always come back, and the river is always there,
looking the same, but yet a bit different, and she always forgives you and
beckons to you.

For the past ten years I have been fishing a little trout
stream an hours drive from home. It originates in the hills of the Kettle
Morraine, Southeast Wisconsin’s unique spectacular glacially sculpted landscape.
Although I often think that I know it, it always surprises me with new
discoveries, and although I have little impact on the stream, it has had a
great impact in shaping me; it has crafted my skill and is a piece of me.

It is a fickle and difficult little brook. I often mention
it to other anglers with a touch of possessive hesitance. So many times they
come back from fishing her and are disappointed to have only hooked one fish,
or even none at all. In her many changes and moods the waters may deliver a
spectacular fishing experience, and the next minute, send you packing while
scratching your head in wonder. “Where did all the fish go?” It a brown trout
river after all, and brown trout do have a rather spooky reputation, especially
when harassed by a legion of middle-aged fools with long poles and strange
concoctions of fur and feather.

The river is best fished with no expectations whatsoever,
except to commune with her beauty for a moment in time. It may take a lifetime
to get to know her.

I like it this way. The creek is ‘middlin’ kind of water:
not the best, not something you would travel a hundred miles to experience, but
your home. You know it, and it hides wild trout.

Every fly angler has a piece of water like this. Somewhere
where we go to walk in our own footprints and live in our own thoughts.
Adventure or non-adventure come together. No pressure, no storied names of
runs, just some wild trout and the hope of a bright connection.

In such a comfortable relationship, sometimes you can answer
the questions before they are asked, and sometimes you have to just walk away.
The river will still be there tomorrow, and a new approach or a renewal may
work wonders, like a change of pace. As we get to know the river, we develop
patterns, both good and bad. We leave our preverbal towels laying around, and
eat our eggs the same way every morning.

Still, there are discoveries to be made, and when you think
you know it all and are content to start naming the trout, you watch a kid with
a cheap spinning rod outfish you ten to one precisely because he doesn’t know
what you know. Perhaps a fresh approach again, or a mind less clouded with
dogma and familiarity might be order. Every work of art is an approach, both by
the artist (the stream) and the viewer, reader or listener as interpreter.
Listen to the same interpretation all the time, and we may miss the nuances and
possibilities.

We never talk about this creek the same way we would other
waters. Our tales might be vague and respectful and lacking in bravado and
detail. “How did you do” might be answered by a slow scratching of the
forehead, and a mystic “Oh, I got a few,…. Beautiful evening isn’t it?” True
lovers don’t tell tales of the bedroom.

My home river is not the place I would go to prove a point,
but instead to slowly fish an old favorite cane rod.

She can be moody. Like an old companion, I know the brook’s
mood swings. That little pool that came alive one evening and danced like a
string quartet of trout slurping hendricksons has never been the same. It seems
that there are no trout in there. Your friend looks at you as you describe the
ten fish you caught back to back last week, and rolls his or her eyes as if to
call you a grand teller of fish-tails, but you know what lives there, even if since
then, the pool fishes like someone dumped bleach in it. On a hot July day,
don’t press her; let her lay peacefully napping until the coolness of evening
breezes awake her slumbers, and instead of a rebuke, she may turn and gently
kiss you on the cheek.

One late spring day my friend Joe and I set about to find
the actual headwater spring that feeds the creek. We went slogging through the
hillsides, getting marled and stuck in quicksand and bog, and scrambled over
seemingly a thousand fallen trees with a million branches, all the time
imagining a single big spring, and when after miles and hours, we were
surrounded by a morass of spring seeps, realized that we were standing in the
headwaters. Sometimes you have to just open your eyes by sitting down and staring
off into space to realize that your search is over, and whatever it was you
were looking for, you have found it by sitting on it by accident.

The stream begins to come into its own when several tiny
spring seeps coming out of the giant hill you can see twenty miles off flow
together to form a trickle no more than two feet wide. Here undercuts and root
balls, fallen logs, and weeds hide trout that only a well disciplined stealthy
approach and a bow and arrow cast can cover. Creep up to a bush at a crouch and
peek over the grass. Plan the shot and the path to get there hiding yourself
all the way. Move slowly and do everything right, and you might hook or spook a
single fish. Might. This is like fishing at the beginning of time. It is an
infant river here, and like the smell of a newborn baby, the water has a
natural purity. It tastes like the ancient glacier, purified by flowing over
eons of gravel and rock. It is refreshingly cold, and its trickling reflections
of light are like the blinking eyes of something that has been underground in
the womb of the earth and has just arrived surprised at the surface brightness.

I tend to disappear into this upper stretch, deaf, blind and
hidden to the mundane world, or even other anglers. My friend Gordy, who guides
the river once spotted my car on this upper confluence and went searching for
me, shouting all the way, but never finding me. I was oblivious. To this day,
he reminds me about this story, and swears I was hiding somewhere. Instead, I
was doing my best heron imitation, mesmerized by a tiny flashing tail of a
trout appearing now and again under a sunken log. I never heard him either.

There are times in May, as the migration of song-birds moves
slowly though the area woods and streams, that I find myself distracted by the
flitting of a redstart, the flash of a warbler, the song of the oriole, or the
majestic stature of a indigo bunting. I neglect the fishing to spot woodpeckers
and spy on green herons and bitterns. The creek has quite a few swampy areas, which
attract wild turkeys that have a habit of holding their cover and then madly
flushing when you are twenty feet away, scaring the skin off of you and
interrupting the little counterpoint you were trying to achieve with a blue
winged olive dry fly. The same pair of sandhill cranes nest in a marsh adjacent
to the river each spring and raise voices as well as their young. I always say
“Hi” to them, and although they fly away in alarm, they circle in a wide arc,
and come back to the nest, their camouflaged heads with that tell-tail red spot
peeking above the cattails.

A lot of discoveries have happened and memories have been
made in and along the banks of this river: the first 14” wild brown I ever took
with a size 20 Blue Winged Olive mayfly dry-fly with 6X and a fifty foot cast,
learning how to fish a nymph dropper behind the dry for the first time, finding
a secluded shallow portion of the river deep in the woods, and due to getting
off the beaten path, having a ball with ten inch wild trout and a Catskill
March Brown, and just sitting on the bank of the river in a sudden torrential
downpour letting the water cascade off the hood of my jacket and the tips of my
fingers as I meditated on life and nature and fishing.

I have met anglers on the stream that became life-long
friends, I have fished it on an opening day in March that saw two foot deep
snow on the banks and a 23 degree air temperature. I have fished in August when
I have taken a midday nap sitting in the cool water to get out of the heat, and
felt a little bit like a trout myself. I have fished it when the wind howled,
when the mosquitoes were so bad, that I finally fled back to the car. I have
knocked deer flies into the river that swarmed around my hat and tried to bite
through, and watched as a trout came up out of nowhere and ate them, but not my
flies. I have cast to a distant clump of overhanging grass, and only by
accident spotted the biggest trout on the pool lying at my feet, ignoring my
feeble attempts, and looking for his own supper. I have fished the midge
emerger hatch and become profoundly frustrated.

Ah, the bloody midges. The primary food sources in the river
are small size 30 olive midges. One can see them as a sort of moving fog over
the riffles in spring and summer. They are maddening to imitate and fish. One
year, as hatches intermingled in a favorite stretch of literally perfect
dry-fly water, I caught numerous fish on small dry flies. In the ensuing years
the trout have either disappeared, or become far more wary. The little rings of
fish sipping emergers are there, but the fish seem to be phantoms. They won’t
touch a dry, and shy from a nymph. They are looking for an emergent size 30
marzipan bon-bon with a crooked wing or something like that. Whatever they are
eating, it sure must taste good to them. This year, if time permits, I am going
to figure it out. I already have some size 22 sparse olive midge emergers
ready. These are different from the ones that didn’t work the last time out or
the month before, and also different from the ones that didn’t work last year.
When I finally re-master this little pool, it will feel like an accomplishment.

It was here on this creek that, by necessity, I learned to
place my fly with accuracy. The whole river is at its largest the width of a
sidewalk, and is overgrown with roses, raspberries, nettles, dogwood, alders,
buckthorn, and wildflowers. A glance rearward to ensure the path and gauge the
distance limitations of the backcast are the beginnings of every cast, as is
the necessity of reaching to place the fly in one path, and the leader in
another. Long drifts are not necessary, and if the fly is to be eaten, it
usually dies a few seconds after hitting the water. Usually, it goes ignored.

Of course, everything changes, even old marriages. The local
Trout Unlimited chapter that has been responsible for the restoration of the
river is going to undertake a massive de-brushing and cutting program on the
river this year. I am kind of mixed on this.

On one hand, I think we should adapt ourselves to the stream
more than make the stream try to adapt itself to our whims, but then again,
that may just be a wishful philosophical fart since the hypocrisy lies in the
fact that without the restoration that has happened, there would be no trout
and the stream would be a muddy, silted mess, but one can still grumble that
changes in the marriage are not to our liking.

Nature and moving water have a way of making man’s best
efforts at control a temporary thing at best, and the alders will grow back and
in a few years, the whole process will begin again. The cutting might be a good
thing though, as the stream does get a bit choked in summer, but then that is
mostly the canary grass, which reaches heights of eight feet and sways over the
water. Nobody can control the grasses.

I guess I just fear
that the stream may end up resembling a meandering put-put golf course,
complete with fiberglass statues of Isaac Walton with waving arms as obstacles,
and a little marking card to record your casts. Perhaps ‘Par’ might rather
refer to juvenile striped markings on trout, and not the stream course itself.
But, then, we all fear change, and over-react. I am sure it will be fine, and
if, for a time, it looks like a giant weed-whacker got drunk and went on a
rampage, there are always the more secluded and wooded areas where the trout
are smaller, but the footprints encountered are my own.

That’s the neat thing about knowing a little river on this
intimate basis; one can always find open water. I might not be able to choose
my access, but I can drive the couple of miles and poke about finding where
people are, and slip in between them.

All these memories and experiences, good and bad, including
falling in the water, breaking your rod, losing flies in the bushes, getting poison
ivy, and spotting and catching the wild brookie living in a two-inch back eddy
next to a rock make us the ‘Old-Farts’ of the river. I guess I wear that on my
sleeve and am proud of it. Putting in one’s time has rewards, especially in the
time needed to get to know a river with such intimacy that one can refer to it
as ‘Home.’ Being an ‘Old Fart’ also has other advantages. Emerging from bushes
like a phantom covered in mud, crawling through a culvert to get out of the
river when lost in the dark, and sleeping in the cemetery do kind of give one a
reputation for eccentric behavior, and as rumors lead to exaggerated tales of
that crazy guy fishing dry flies he made from his own nose hair and such,
people can tend to leave you alone until you want their company, which to an
angler, can often be a good thing.

I have to leave it at that, especially after the nose hair
comment, and go fish this stream in my mind for a spell. Outside it is 11 below
zero.

The Classical Angler

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Intermediate Wraps:

If angling is the contemplative sport, as Mr. Walton would have us understand, that contemplation should not be on the final destination, but upon the path that led us there. Let that path not be the easy one nor the commonplace, but one of inner discovery and learning, for that much the better when the fish is finally brought to hand.

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A quiet rest stop for we anglers who enjoy tradition and literary effort, and a site that intends to inspire, question, and spur thinking.

There is power in words, and art in the angling which we need to appreciate. as we journey through the riffles of life, never forget the art and the approach are as important as the fish brought to hand.If you like this blog, please tell others about it and link to it.

Comment from the archives: This is the greatest writing on fly-fishing I have ever read since the stories of Traver and MacQuarrie. Your use of analogies and the romance and reference to art are one of a kind. Keep writing and keep this art alive please!